Young People Engaging in Volunteering: Questioning a Generational Trend in an Individualized Society

Abstract

Today young people experience a world that is being significantly changed by large-scale transformations in education and labour markets. Youth, as a generation, is most affected by those changes, since they are more likely to reshape their ways of living in response to the conditions they face, which inevitably produce inequalities in their lives. Volunteering is one of their responses. This paper aims to discuss the generational motivations and attitudes of a group of 11 European young people to participate in a European Voluntary Service project during a period of one year. The data was collected through an ethnographic methodological approach conducted between 2013 and 2014 in a Youth Centre in northern Portugal. Results clearly indicate that young people have an instrumental relationship with volunteering, which is mainly focused on the individual benefits that they believe they will acquire in their personal and professional life. Volunteering emerges as an opportunity to escape and to overcome the persisting challenges and constraints posed by our society; namely unemployment and precariousness, both of which are on the rise amongst young generations around the world.

Youth Activism in Political Squats between Centri Sociali and Case Occupate

“…The portrait of the current relationship between youth, politics and participation sketched at the beginning of this article described young people who in most cases are not very interested in politics, have difficulty in positioning themselves on the left-right scale, as well as in finding a political party among the existent ones as a personal point of reference They also express very low trust in the political system and in its institutions and actors, in particular political parties and politicians. As a logical consequence, they tend to be weakly involved in institutional forms of participation (the only exception being voting), and even if most of them express interest in issues of collective relevance, and are able to define socially relevant goals for politics, only a very narrow minority define themselves as politically engaged, although a wider sector is involved in various forms of social engagement, and a smaller but considerable sector is also involved in several forms of occasional non-institutional activities of political participation [1][2][3][4][5][6]9,[24][25][26][27][28][29][30][31][32][33][34][35][36][37][38].…”

“…Youth activism in political squats is characterized by the same mix of self-satisfaction and attention to "the other", of auto-and hetero-orientation, as well as by the same high levels of flexibility and organizational elasticity, as several other current forms of juvenile participation [3,5,6,24,26,31]. 9 Our research clearly shows this mix, considering not only individual motivations but also collective activities and organizational processes: The proposal of a venture, its characteristics, the division of tasks and roles, have come out as the result of the interplay between collective aims and forms of action with individual sensitivities and preferences, without any hierarchical imposition or any stabilized, formal definition.…”

“…Research shows the marks of an ongoing crisis of representative democracy: Young people, compared to adults, are less interested in politics, follow less regularly the political debate, have less trust in political systems, institutions, political parties and politicians, and are less involved in the most institutionalized forms of political participation, such as voting, activism in political parties and candidacies for formal political roles [15][16][17][18][19][20][21][22][23]. At the same time, however, a relevant portion of them is also aware of today's main social problems, reflective about potential solutions, and more active than adults in non-institutional forms of participation, such as social movements, protests, petitions, and in particular on-line digital socio-political activities, as well as in some forms of social intervention [2,5,[24][25][26][27][28][29][30][31][32].…”

“…Yet other works describe young people as significantly expressing ethical and pro-social sensitivities but through developing new forms of political activism as well as of social and civic engagement instead of more traditional modalities of participation [25,26,31,[50][51][52][53][54]. In this perspective there is neither a generalized crisis of democratic participation nor a major disenchantment with political issues and civic concerns among youth.…”

The effect of primary education teachers on the formation of pupil citizenship

“…War. Many scholars have suggested that civic and political apathy are most prevalent among young people (Banaji & Buckingham, 2010;Dalton, 2008;Dudley & Gitelson, 2003;Lewis, 2001), but others have argued that the nature of civic participation was changing, with young people turning to less formal and less conventional forms of participation (Furlong & Cartmel, 2007;Harris, Wyn, & Younes, 2010;Jardim & da Silva, 2018), engaging in a more social and less political manner (Zuckerman, 2014) and using social networks (Banaji & Buckingham, 2010;Bennett, 2003;Coleman, 2008;Zukin, Keeter, Andolina, Jenkins, & Delli Carpini, 2006). Furthermore, democracies are also facing problems of social exclusion and lack of social cohesion (Nelson & Kerr, 2006;Schmeets & Coumans, 2013;Schultz, Ainley, Fraillon, Kerr, & Losito, 2010).…”